McAfee VirusScan Home Edition 8.0 & McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 5.0 Bundle is easy to run easy to update. Bad point is hard to tell if it is working properly

McAfee VirusScan Home Edition 8.0 & McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 5.0 Bundle includes on-access scans. Email on-delivery scans, unwanted program scans, Full disk scans and autoupdate. Although I'm not a believer of on-access scans which can be disabled it offers it all, email scan, scheduled full scan, download of latest signatures etc. Port blocking and Email on-delivery scans stops viruses at the doorstep.

I use McAfee VirusScan Home Edition 8.0 Anti Virus Software and McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 5.0 on 10 machines of various versions of MS operating systems and have had good experiences all round. Have used Norton's and found it almost impossible to completely remove. McAfee support in Australia when I have needed it on the rare occasion has also been excellent.

Installing the products went smoothly and no problems were encounted at this stage.

You are required to reboot and then you are shown a user-friendly wizard providing easy step-by-step settings. That went fine and now to update.

Users are required to signup to get updates. This of course is free and only took 5 minutes to do. After I verified my account, I started to download the updates. The first update was the McAfee Update module, which needed a reboot. Then after i updated again, VirusScan needed an updated, then i was told to reboot and then same with the firewall. Which in Norton, you download everything in one go and do only one or two reboots.

Running these two programs with my system didn't slow or ate my resources unlike Norton did and my booting time was actually faster.

The scanning of files is quite slow compared to Norton, however, McAfee does catch more than Norton in my experience and a PC Utilities Mag has shown. The only problem is it lacked the pause button so if you need to quickly do something without being interrupted by the scan all systems files. Also in Norton I liked the status bar of scanning emails etc. Also you cannot select multiple drives to scan, only one area to scan e.g C drive.

A much improvement over its previous version, which I tried and it messed up in the uninstallation so i had to remove it manually. Both products are good in performance, user-friendly and security.